Answered Question Marks instead of Chinese - Database Config issue?

Hello All:

This is actually a question I should know, but I feel a bit confused. I have sucessfully dealt with this issue before, but my brain seems highly skilled at forgetting useful info.

I am starting up a new modx install, and want to display Chinese on some pages and English on others. Right now, however, all the Chinese just turns into question marks and the occasional random smiley.

Is this strictly an issue of UTF-8? We are getting the db controller or whatever changed now, but I want to confirm that its strictly a db collation issue, and not that I have failed to install some sort of language pack for Chinese language support.

Babel and migxMultiLang would then be different issues...about managing languages rather than just displaying...is that correct?

Thank in advance, hope this one is easy to answer!

Thank you so much, I really appreciate the confirmation. Its tricky because you have to confirm the settings in several places.

The problem is now solved! Thanks again Susan!

When someone uses CPanel's database wizard to create a database and user, the first thing they have to do is to use phpMyAdmin to change the charset and collation of the database to utf8. Otherwise, the text fields will be the MySQL default, usually latin-1. It's possible to configure MySQL to use utf8 by default, but hardly any hosting provider does that.

If you need to convert, see this: http://bobsguides.com/convert-db-utf8.html